Comment by monkeyfoop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkeyfoop | Hacker News Reader

They are not the ones that took us to war with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya.

The mainstream news is the one that is complicit in the spread of dangerous Conspiracy theories such as: "Saddam was behind 9/11 and has Weapons of Mass Destruction!"

Boom. 10,000's of US soldiers dead and many more crippled.

1 Million Iraqi people dead.

Infowars has more often than not been right on important matters. Is Alex Jones over the top? Of course!

Are their Chem Trails and other conspiracy theories "out there"? You bet!

But look up MK Ultra on Wikipedia and other programs that the US/CIA ran and you will realize that truth is stranger and much more dangerous than the "conspiracy theories and the penis pills" that Alex Jones is talking about.

At least those Penis pills aren't like the Opiates and depression medication that kills 10's of thousands a year that MSNBC, Fox, CNN et al peddle.

Use your ability to think: this is an information war and the MSM is the most dangerous kind of "fake news" and they are fighting tooth and nail to be the ones allowed to define their competing broadcasters as "fake" (since Infowars is now becoming huge)

>Infowars has more often than not been right on important matters.

Would you mind providing a list of those things it's been right on?

Gay frogs :D (although they claim this is a government plot, rather than the US gov refusing to ban use of certain chemicals at the behest of farmers)

Yes, that's the unfortunate problem. They often bring up issues and questions that won't be discussed anywhere else. Then ruin it by throwing in some heavy conspiracy without any supporting evidence.

> Infowars has more often than not been right on important matters

I agree with the spirit of your comment, except this bit steps over the line and ruins the whole thing.

The thing about Infowars is they are close a random noise generator. They can't help but be right on some things, as anything random is bound to do.

By contrast, the MSM is a structured but biased source. Their narratives will tend to align with reality quite well, only getting a few facts wrong here and there, due to internal processes that filter out the inconvenient facts.

So, it's true that already having to apply critical thinking, it's actually easier to sift through Infowars's crap, as most of it is blatant garbage that can be easily discarded - whereas the MSM you'll hear the same exact message from multiple sources, and have a much harder time picking out the little bit of actively harmful garbage. But this doesn't mean that you can point to randomness and say it has any sort of predictive power.

(Of course, my comment here is certainly not condoning the growing centralized censorship touched on in the original article. We've been destined for this slow motion trainwreck ever since the term AJAX was coined, and it's looking like we need to abandon centralized communication platforms ASAFP!)

Nice try Alex.

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